Soon after winning Darren the DARE. Lion for being the best DARE student in the 5th grade, I discovered that if you lift up his shirt, disembowel his back with scissors, and replace the shirt, Darren is transformed into an effective and amusingly ironic contraption for the transport of drugs and/or paraphernalia. For those of you who don’t know, DARE is a program in which a cop comes to your middle school, reflects fondly on his youthful days when he’d plant candy and cheat sheets in kids’ desks before beating them with a yardstick, and then tells students things about drugs that not only pique their interest but also provide practical information about where to find such products. He also takes questions such as “Is that gun real?” “Can I hold your gun?” “Did you shoot anyone today?” and “Are you going to shoot me?” (1)
As far as DARE students go, I was the stickiest chronic, which is why I won Darren the Drug Mule. The number one lesson I learned from this oh-so-effective War on Drugs operation was always seek help for a friend with a problem. So, if my friend is killing himself and invoking Satan by getting high, it is my duty to inform a helpful authority figure – like a policeman. This is great advice, on par with saying “if you are having impure, homosexual thoughts, talk to a priest.” In both cases, I’m sorry to say – you’re fucked.
In high school, we were bestowed with the “Honor Code,” a holy tome that should have been carved on two tablets (by “tablet” I mean a “slab of stone,” I don’t mean the kind that is easy to swallow). This document taught us that if we witness “dishonorable” behavior and we do not report it to the friendly authorities, we are as guilty as the perpetrator. This of course was enforced by the “Honor Board,” a committee of your peers. (2)
Unfortunately, my school had no good programs that offered a combination of snitching, authoritarianism, and obesity. School officials in Rome, Georgia, however, have this taken care of. By selling candy and soda, Model High School has raised money to use as rewards for students who rat out their classmates for various offenses. A student can get $10 for reporting theft, $50 for reporting drug use, and a seat on the state legislature for reporting the teaching of evolution.
When did high school students stop dreaming of being rock and roll stars and start planning for a career in the DEA? Children, in case you didn’t know, are our future – our cutthroat, back-stabbing, greedy, ambitious, despicable future. Throughout America, kids aren’t getting high in the attic and listening to Pearl Jam’s “Ten.” No, they’re in the foyer listening to the soul-crushing sounds of Matchbox Twenty and planning how to get into Yale, how to make the most money, and how to sell out their best friend for their own gain.
Ah, youth: sex, drugs, rock and roll, anarchy, Kiss posters, Sex Pistols quotes, terrible poetry, smash the state, kill your television, don’t trust anyone over thirty, Stalinism. Uh, I hope I didn’t lose you with that last one. Maybe the Stalinism part is of a younger generation. Recently, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation spent one million dollars researching the future of the First Amendment by surveying students. Let’s see what these young rebel rabble-rousers had to say: over a third of high-schoolers think the First Amendment goes too far in the rights it guarantees; half believe the government can censor the Internet; almost a third believe that people should not be allowed to voice unpopular opinions; and 75% believe that flag burning is illegal. Way to stick it to The Man, you yuppie-spawn neocons-in-training.
The vast majority of those reading this column are aware of the plight of public education, as schools, especially in inner cities, are plagued by scarce resources, overcrowding, and violence. It would be wrong, though, to think that these are the only schools with problems. The American educational system targets children at a young age to turn schools into a caste system, to identify positive or negative traits within future workers, and to create a cyclical, dependent relationship between the job market and schooling that ensures the system a mechanism for capitalist reproduction. In simpler terms, ya know in The Wall when those kids go through the meat straining machine thing? Yeah, it’s like that.
The Patriot Act Generation (I hope this catches on) is the result of schools with absurd priorities, an inept and dishonest media, surging corporate influence, an imperialist administration that manufactures consent through repression and intimidation, and the break-up of Rage Against the Machine. We’ve had Generation X; we’ve had Generation Y; now we see the birth of Generation W: Generation Whore – the Generation that sold out before it even had anything to sell.
Yesterday it was reported that a high school boy in San Bernadino, CA was suspended for a week because he wore make-up to his public school. It’s a good bet that most of his classmates didn’t care. When you’ve graduated from DARE, when you’ve been exposed to the pedagogical version of the TIPS Program; when you’ve had the COINTELPRO style of schooling; your first thought is “one less kid applying to my first-choice college.” The suspended student shouldn’t be the only one whose face is red.
Darren the DARE Lion is the king of this dismal jungle. If he’s not dethroned and strategically disemboweled, if our schools are not freed of his reign, if the future generations do not avoid the grave mistakes of the past, than this jungle is our future – ruled by Darren, populated by rats.
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